Five Poems by Feng Sun Chen

COMPANY EDITIONS is an independent publisher of poetry and visual art. The journal, Company, was founded in 2013 and is published three or four times per year. We will also be publishing chapbooks beginning in late 2016. Company Editions is based in Athens, GA, Iowa City, IA, and Cambridge, MA. You can contact the editors by emailing editors@companyeditions.com.

UNSURMOUNTED WEAKNESS

Now I would like to make an
announcement. This is out of the amniotic afterlooking
state of having been inside someone, the words she gave to me, that swam
between us like the rushing of air out of a broken airplane or the dust in a
museum being filled with the tantrum of a set of children. Inside the
incoherence of a human pulsation, there are gut feelings, but no situation
for the displacement of entire memories and modes of knowing as the gods have
no names, and in the deepening of a global glottal voice of inertia is deep
democracy. In any moment of encountering life between the optimistic glass
panels of death, It is that, after having written quite a magnificent series
of transcendent lyrical poetry in the upper awnings of a tower, my tail has
set fire to it. But it does not fall. It is not real.

A NOVEL ABOUT WATER

China. Does not break like glass.

My mother’s heart, the breaking
sounds

like the brown-furred housegods now houseghosts

ripping open small packages of
vitamin crackers.

The sound gathers me up at night,
magnified

by sorcery, shows me the image of gigantic
beasts

crashing through the walls and the
floor of my room.

Underneath my room is the kitchen,
where there is china,

the other side of the world. The
inauguration

drills a hole through the core of the
world

and the molten core protrudes out.

It came out of me and screamed and
bit her unguent heart

with rows of rodent teeth, and even
though my heart

was fruit leather, it was breaking
too.

I had no friend in the world.

I did not yet know that I was made of
plastic metal rubber,

I only knew that I was not recognized
as human,

but my vagina had powers that could
give

me the semblance of love.

BECAUSE HE DOES NOT LIKE TO WATCH MOVIES ALONE

Our mothers escape us. “Nicole,” my mother
says, “Why don’t you act like you care about me?” To evade or invade, these
are the dual effects of speaking back in another tongue, the tongue of who my
grandmother calls the white devils, devils who have become trusted experts of
the Good Life. In the memory, someone guides a chinese
man to the edge of the dock and inserts the hook into his mouth... The idea
is to hook the hook through the tongue... When he hangs... the tongue is
ripped out and it hangs like a skinned fish... Probably part of the face and
jaw... Such fish wiggles and flops and the red paint tastes of copper and
scabs... Pain is not truly registered... so it is truest... It is an exiled
thing... an excretion from the star pore of God... Creativity or cruelty...
its daughters swim through me... So the others know what comes next... they
remember all of a sudden the crust of their life’s content... which screams
through the adrenaline now... ANDROID< I DON”T
KNOW WHERE THE BOTTLE OF STERILE SALINE WENT YOU WILL HAVE TO DO WITHOUT
FULLNESS FOR NOW. this is a full bodied text, but I am a wasted thigh.
Because the wasted man is trapped by his own labyrinth of mirrors, I worry
about how I am not allowed to worry about other things. The bubbling
underside of my face is the thing every writer has been scrabbling to get at

but what the bubbling underside of my
face which escapes my understanding

is crushed by the legacy of
repetition

the repetition of salt, sugar,
crystals, ignorance, amnesia, ammonia,

the bubbling underside of my face
without consciousness

does not care if Gertrude Stein is
patriarchal

goes on by the sex of the clock

goes on through the tide of
consciousness raising

WE ARE HERE TO FINISH THE JOB

We are neither human nor alien.

We fly on the membranous hot air
thundering up

from eternal summer asphalt.

You’ve picked the kunzite stone

that tells me you are a star child.

That’s why your skin flakes off

in pieces of hard crystals and I
thought

you were a snake.

But snakes come from the sky

and drink the moon water.

THIS TOO

Do I evade love or invade a sensible
performance of filial piety by acting like an affectless robot? My mother
often stares at me like a child, unrelenting, obsessive, enraptured, and I have
often been annoyed and embarrassed by the touch of her gaze, but I find
myself gorging my body and soul with the sight of my lover, at the bottom of
which lies the silent appraisal of motherhood. All the wisdom I have been
given from this world began with the biological gravity of my mother’s gaze,
the sharp wires behind it, her soft individuality and chitinous opacity. Love
hits me.